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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Petrolio
What is so fascinating about unfinished novels, like unfinished symphonies, is that they were never intended for public airing in their actual condition; they are exploratory works in progress. We can only imagine what the finished Petrolio (Oil) would have been like — monumental, perhaps? Pasolini drafted only a quarter of its proposed 2,000 pages. But there's something deeply affecting about the fragmented manuscript, in parts unreadable, that Pasolini left behind; a dancing star does emerge, somehow, out of the chaos. Reading it feels like rummaging around in Pasolini's subconscious doodlings or suddenly reading his unexpurgated diaries, written at dawn after his nightly sexual exploits. We encounter much that seems unintended, complex, provocative, not easily assimilated. Like the newspaper photos that were shown of Pasolini's punctured corpse, it makes us appreciate all the more the loss of its creator. Pasolini was so full of plans: who else could have contemplated both a life of Socrates and a life of St. Paul? Though Pasolini was murdered 25 years ago, his presence is still felt in this novel. The question is, did he actually, as Petrolio's narrator states, want "to die in my creation, as one dies in birth, ejaculating into the mother's womb"? The opening letter to Alberto Moravia acts like an extra frame, explaining Pasolini's intention to put himself between the novel and the reader, questioning the author's role, being didactic, but also helping us to see the ambitious scale of its design. He considered setting it into a conventional narrative frame, which might have made it more acceptable, but much less heroic. It was simply intended to be a modern Satyricon, a global critique of Italy as he knew it – delinquents, demon-gods and company directors included. In parts its bare, exacting prose possesses, like frescoes by Giotto or Cimabue, a heavy, static quality, a steady, dedication to getting to the essence of the things described. But its patchiness, its unfinishedness, its vast lacunae, reveal that he was not a novelist by nature — which Pasolini knew. Its presentation with gaps, dashes, dots and annotations give it a skittish movement, a peculiar, scattered electricity. This is no dead book. It is reminiscent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in that sense, but without the humor. There is one main character called Carlo, and one narrator, but both are split into two. Carlo 1, a business executive who travels to the Middle East, controls his alter ego, Carlo 2, a sex-obsessed, unregenerate symbol of the happy carnality of the underclass (and eventually an almost mythic being who can trans-gender at will). The narrator also divides, one voice intrusively commenting on the narration and how it should be read, and the other fusing symbiotically with the cynical views of the splintered Carlo. We find such reflections as, "Every author is a dictator, of course, but a gentle dictator*.always ready to repent; to go backward, even to let himself be killed." The whole thing is sequenced in parallel sections but also seems modeled on Dante's Inferno with a schematic series of visions, each one more revelatory than the last. As in Pasolini's films, sex is used as a metaphor of power and never without the focus on its disturbing ambiguities. Carlo 2 is a ruled by lust and exhibitionism; no area is too public for his displays of masturbation. He has sex with his grandmother, his sisters, his nieces, his maid and countless underage girls of the neighborhood. Another scene takes place in a field, where twenty, "neither more nor less" peasant boys take turns having oral/anal sex with Carlo, the recipient, whose head is pressed into the earth. This is deliberately repetitive, but also evokes in the reader an inspiring sense of the absolute humility of Carlo's self-abnegation, which is repeatedly and painstakingly described to the level of perverse religiosity. Then, the narrative splinters again, and connections are lost in threads tangential to the whole, each one including notes sketching out the unfinished sections. Carlo, cut off from his other self, infiltrates fascist groups and moves further towards totalitarian gestures, and eventually, sainthood. The rich and complex inventions that arise from this projected novel make it a grand opus, a multiple parable, disturbing, demanding, mysterious, often confusing, yet fulfilling more of its promise than might be expected. So, although Petrolio does not satisfy on every level, its visionary fervor and its myth-making potential should still reverberate for some time to come. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? |
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